<p>I’m totally confused at the way the financial aid /scholarship jargon is worded. Almost all the private schools say that their scholarships are need based. We have twins graduating high school who want to apply to schools like Northwestern for French Horn performance. I looked at the yearly tuition and its 56K. My husband and I make a decent income > 150K but we are supporting aged parents, one kid in college and we live in one of the most expensive places ( the Bay area). On paper we are well to do but the reality is that we live paycheck to paycheck. There is no way we can send the twins if they are accepted at NW. I almost want to tell them not to apply at all there but its been their dream school since 8th grade.</p>
<p>How can we qualify for a need based scholarship and are there any other scholarships available to music students from any other foundations that we can apply for?</p>
<p>Most music schools/conservatories also give merit-based scholarships. The proportion of money which is merit-based versus need-based varies from school to school. At some, most of the money is need-based while at others it is mostly merit-based. </p>
<p>The calculations for financial need will certainly take into consideration that you have three children in college. Having three children in college simultaneously is actually financially better from a need-based aid perspective than having three children in college consecutively. Usually the children’s expenses are considered (i.e. if your child presently in college goes to a local community college with $2000 annual tuition and lives at home, you will not receive nearly as much financial aid for the twins as you would if your child in college is paying $60 000 annually for tuition, board and room). </p>
<p>Most schools will take into consideration extraneous factors like your support of aged parents. Such factors may not go directly into a formula, but may be considered on an informal basis in reassessing your need.</p>
<p>I understand that many of the better and more expensive colleges do grant need-based aid to families with incomes around 150K even when only one child is in college. </p>
<p>You should call the financial aid office at NW and ask them directly. Rice is a comparable school to NW in terms of calibre of the music school and the competitiveness of admission both academically and musically: Rice guarantees that full financial need is met for any accepted American citizen (and consequently does not give much merit aid). At 150K, I expect that you would receive a hefty financial aid package if you had two children at school there plus a third child in college. </p>
<p>At Rice the average financial aid package is over $28 000 and at NW it is over $30 000. Both schools meet 100% of the assessed need.</p>
<p>You may want to try one of the online financial aid calculators to estimate how much financial need you will be assessed as having. You may also want to try posting a similar question in the financial aid forum, if you have not already done so.</p>
<p>As violindad says, a $150k income would not rule out the possibility of significant aid for your family, especially if you have 3 kids in private college. An aid calculator would give you an idea of the lowest amount you might receive in terms of need-based aid. But as many people on this board have reported, actual awards vary wildly from college to college, and it’s hard to predict what will happen. In my experience, when a college says it meets 100% of total need, it does not mean much because “total need” is an ambiguous term, and so-called need can be met with loans. Many college do expect that families with higher income should be willing to take loans because they are more capable of paying them back over the long terms than low-income families. As you have undoubtedly thought, your family’s entire pretax income would be wiped out by 3 private college tuitions. But the schools expect that you could shoulder a certain level of parental loan over the years to come. It isn’t supposed to be painless (unfortunately!)</p>
<p>Merit based aid is a tuition discount that colleges use to bring in desirable students. Again, hard to predict. In my experience with my 3 kids who’ve gone through this so far, the results have been all over the place-- sometimes the larger award is at the more prestigious school not known for giving awards. Also, for your own purposes in deciding, factor in the cost of attendance (COA), which can vary according to travel costs and regional cost of living. For example, you live in the Bay area, so if your sons go to Northwestern, there will be a lot of airplane flights. And COA can change over the years. For example, one of my kids goes to school in Cleveland where her mandatory first-year in the dorms was expensive. But it turns out Cleveland apartments off-campus are very cheap, so her COA dropped a lot the second year. </p>
<p>Another thing to think about, and I didn’t really understand this until my 3rd kid, is that financial aid awards are often appealed. A family like yours, with the kind of expenses that don’t turn up in normal finaid formulas, such as the support of aged parents, would be a good candidate for the appeal. Some families automatically appeal every financial aid award; I only appealed awards to schools we were seriously considering. We were advised to give a very detailed appeal including documents and a narrative, as well as letters of support from the studio teacher, if possible, and to ask for a specific amount. It took a long time to put the appeals together. Again, the results were unpredictable. At one very expensive school (not my daughter’s top choice) where she had strong support from the potential teacher and dean, our very reasonable (I thought) appeal was rejected twice. At other schools, the merit award was more than doubled. I wish I had known about appeals for my older two girls.</p>
<p>One thing I am learning as my S’s time approaches with all this, the best thing I can recommend is to talk to the schools, look at their websites, etc. From everything I have learned, the results are all over the place, as Glassharmonica said. Some top level schools basically give need based aid only with maybe a little bit of merit aid, other schools can give merit scholarships to kids who might not get much need based aid…I also suspect that depending on the school (this is my speculation), that results may vary, that a school that officially/generally gives need only aid might give more merit aid to attract a top notch student then they would get if it were mostly need.</p>
<p>In the end, the best bet is to ask the school, call them and give them an outline of your situation, and ask them how having multiple kids in the school, another one at another school, would impact aid and also ask them how much of their aid is based in merit, they would (at least from what I have seen and heard) probably be only too glad to give you an idea, not of specifics, but rather in how they handle things like taking care of parents, etc in the mix. I have been told by people who work for colleges that they spend a lot of time answering these kind of questions (and also dispelling myths, some of which are quite funny) and it is part of their jobs. CC is a great resource as are the books and so forth, but schools spend a lot of time and effort on making sure the right information gets out there, something I can confirm by having known people who had worked for school’s web site development and so forth:)</p>
<p>Thanks All for your valuable insight. I called NW financial aid office and they said to go through the College Board’s calculator that will give a fair idea of the EFC. We have been saving for college ever since the kids were born but the market crash in 2008 wiped out our 529’s and they are limping back. We can at most fund one year for each kid through that.
About Rice, the twins decided that they had no chance of getting in so they did not apply.
I do so hope they will get in somewhere with some aid. My son goes to a UC and they recently increased the fees by about 32 percent last year and another $820 dollars in 2011. Their reasoning is that parents with a higher income will pay more and the UCs can subsidize other students. While I’m all for education being accessible to all, I just wish they would consider parents like us before making adhoc rules.</p>
<p>The other point to note for audition centric admissions is that talent money appears to be an exclusive function results of the applicant’s standing within the respective audition pools. While it can be very school specific, I have seen instances of exceptional candidates with no true financial need offered extremely generous talent awards.</p>